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Paul Thomas Anderson Is Planning To Shoot "Inherent Vice" Next Year

After the success of There Will Be Blood and The Master, director Paul Thomas Anderson has established himself as one of the top filmmakers working today. And in a recent interview with The New York Times, Anderson revealed that his next project will indeed be an adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel, Inherent Vice. The article also revealed that he is planning on filming it within the next year.

Unlike There Will Be Blood, which was a loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel, Oil!, Anderson is looking to stick much closer to the book for Vice. Here is what he said about the project:

“It’s more secretarial,” he said. “The credit should be like ‘secretary to the author.’ ” He added that he has “a large stack of pages” and hopes to shoot next year. “But it’s no less fun. In some ways it’s just what the doctor ordered right now for me: being more selfless.”

“Selfless” is an interesting word to use, because if there is one criticism people had about The Master is that it was a bit self-indulgent. It was intentionally opaque at times, which led some people to have difficulties interpreting the message behind it all. And while Pynchon’s novels are never easy to decipher themselves, Inherent Vice is one of his more accessible works. That, mixed with Anderson's dedication to the source material, could be the recipe for another winner for the director.